My name is Ana and I'm a front end developer in London. I started developing for the web over 10 years ago, as a hobby. I am interested in ethics, indie web, sustainability and cats.
Tag: web design
👓 Overthinking Instagram | Oh Hello Ana
Ana (Oh Hello Ana - Blog)I very rarely share online if something isn’t going well in my life. I’ve always treated my social media the same way most of us do: we only share the good bits. I thought I was doing that but nowadays, I look back at some photos of what looks like an excellent time of my life but now I know ver...
This post has a lot of great things to think about for people either designing social media related websites, or even IndieWeb site designers who might want to take advantage of these things for themselves. I don’t see these issues being written or talked about enough in the community, so I’m glad that designers and developers like Ana are starting to consider them.
As I think about it, some personal-related posts could potentially be marked to auto-expire (unpost themselves) at some future date and be auto-archived to one’s back end so that they’re no longer public, but so that they exist if one wants to look at them personally, but also so that they’re also hidden from the site owner and need to be actively searched for. As an example, I can imagine something along the lines of a “dating” tag so that when one creates an “engaged” or “married” post that all the old dating history disappears? There is some existing artwork and thought about this on the IndieWeb wiki that I came across a week or so ago in relation to Last.fm’s expiring content, but more work and motivation could be added.
Incidentally, like many, I’ve begun reading her regularly and she’s not only quite the writer, but she’s got a pretty little site as well. I highly recommend folks give her a look and subscribe.
Maybe during this Christmas break I will find the guts to do a purge but I know that it will be a “fake purge”. ❧
I’ve been seeing a lot about (Japanese) minimalism this past year in relation to physical goods, but hadn’t considered what a minimal social media presence would look like. This is definitely something that could use some more thought, both in minimalism of code, typography, and even design.
December 19, 2018 at 02:57PM
👓 Twitter is relaunching the reverse-chronological feed as an option for all users starting today | The Verge
Just hit that sparkle, fam
Apparently so many people are using shortcuts like “filter:follows -filter:replies” from a few months back that they’ve decided to fix their UI.
Of course the article indicates that it seems to be higher engagement (aka clicks for advertising) as the motivator rather than simply making a stronger and more usable product:
Keith Coleman, vice president of product at Twitter, told The Verge that in tests, users who had access to the easy toggle participated in more conversations than average.
👓 I have a new website | Justin Jackson
After 10 years on WordPress, I'm making a big change.
I do love the look and feel of this website. Great Xeroxed feel of an 80’s zine.
hat tip: Kevin Marks comment “If you want a samizdata feel, there is this layout to emulate https://justinjackson.ca/new-website”
Kevin also mentions a great photo filter for something like this at https://codepen.io/kevinmarks/pen/PyLjRv
🔖 Talk Like a Pirate, Me Hearties | Adactio.com
Simply, you put in a URL and this tool will return a web page that “translates” the page into pirate speech. The UI is so sparse here you can’t do much but put in a URL (though without knowing exactly what is going to happen).
Ideal for your talk-like-a-pirate-day browsing every September 19th. Maybe a bookmarklet that does this would be cool? Come to think of it, maybe having a browser extension that does this for you automatically on every page you visit on September 19th would be a fun little toy!
👓 Key | The Independent Variable
I like how the author creates a key to their posts here. Most are obvious based on the emojis, but if they’re not more obvious are they really as broadly useful from a UI perspective? I do wish they all had links to archives of each type however.
👓 Editorial Layouts, Exclusions, and CSS Grid | Rachel Andrew
A little while back at An Event Apart Chicago, I chatted to Rob Weychert about a grid use case he felt the spec couldn’t solve. He has now written that use case up, which you can read on his blog - Editorial Layouts, FLoats, and CSS Grid. At the time I thought that this sounded like an Exclusions ...
👓 What do you want to do when you grow up, kid? | Robin Rendle
I fell into web design via books. When I was maybe six or seven I remember reading about polar bears and how they hibernated in a large compendium about all sorts of natural habitats and curiosities ranging from foxes hunting in the desert and wild horses running on the Mongolian plains to Emperor penguins shivering in the Antarctic. And to this day I still remember that giant, double page spread of a bear and her cubs. It was a wondrous illustration but what piqued my curiosity was how the writer described hibernation.
What a great little story here. I may be biased because I love all of these types of things myself.
👓 Why celebrity gossip blogs refuse to abandon Livejournal | The Verge
The unchanging aesthetic of Crazy Days and Nights and DListed is a form of time travel
A few interesting points, but it actually is appealing to the sort of nostalgia it is cautiously against.
🔖 Unsplash | Beautiful Free Images & Pictures
Beautiful, free images and photos that you can download and use for any project. Better than any royalty free or stock photos.
👓 The Problem With Feedback | The Atlantic
Companies and apps constantly ask for ratings, but all that data may just be noise in the system.
A great framing of a lot of crazy digital exhaust that online services and apps are collecting that don’t do much. I’ve also thought for a while about the idea of signal to noise ratio of these types of data as well as their quantization levels which often don’t make much sense to me. I don’t think that there are any IndieWeb realizations of these sorts of (mostly business) systems in the wild yet, but this is an important area to begin to consider when they do.
Typically in my experience, a freestanding “m” subdomain is often used to host and indicate the mobile version of a website. I’ve just noticed that the URL design of Signal v. Noise instead uses their
https://m.signalvnoise.com subdomain to presumably indicate “Medium”, the social silo that hosts their content.👓 The way out | Manton Reece
Manton Reece (manton.org)There have been many articles written in the last month about the role of social networks. Some even reach the obvious conclusion: that the top social networks are too big. This interview on Slate was fairly representative, covering monopolies and centralized power. But these articles always stop sh...
👓 My New Articles Archive | EddieHinkle.com
Eddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)So as I mentioned earlier today, I've added a database that keeps a searchable cache of my posts in my website so I don't have to open hundreds of files in order to build the various pages of my website. It's allowed me to move almost all of my pages off of Jekyll and later this month I'll be removing Jekyll from even being on my server. The database as made a lot of things easier, one is that it is now quick and easy for me to create feeds of posts. Right now I have two types of feeds, tag feeds and channel feeds. Tag feeds show all the posts I have created with a given tag. Channels Channel feeds are a bit different, I have two types of Channels: static and dynamic. A static channel isn't too much different than a tag, when I create a post I either manually add the channel to the post or I have a preset rule inside my server that attached the channel to the post. The key to a static channel is that it just shows all the posts that have been assigned to it. The dynamic channels are really where its at. Dynamic channels allow me to provide an id (which becomes the url that you use to access it), a name (which displays at the top), a layout (currently I have 3 types of layouts: Cards, Gallery and Archives) and finally a "query". The query is where the magic is, this is essentially a set of properties that will be passed into the database query. That means I can dynamically, without writing any code (just a config file) create a new page providing it's url, name, layout and some requirements around what type of information I want to display. Articles Archives One thing my new channels has allowed me to do is to create the Archives layout and set up a query that fetches all the articles I've written and display them in a list. It was super easy to set this up because of the way my database cache is working and the way I've configured my channels. I group them by year, then by month and display each article on it's own line. I really like how it turned out. I was heavily influenced by Manu Moreale and the article archive they display on their site. I imagine mine will grow more into it's own design and style over time but everything starts somewhere and I like starting mine based on Manu's work (Thanks for the inspiration!). You can check it out over here, or below is an example of the articles archive as of today The other nice thing is that because my website already supports Dark Mode, on macOS Mojave with Dark Mode turned on, all the colors will automatically invert on this page with no extra work!
Following Derek Powazek
It's pronounced poe-WAH-zek.
Derek Powazek has worked the web since 1995 at pioneering sites like HotWired, Blogger, and Technorati. He is the author of “Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places” (New Riders, 2001). He is the cofounder of JPG, the photography magazine that’s made by its community. He has been Chief of Design for HP’s MagCloud, advisor to a handful of startup companies, and creator of Fray, the magazine of true stories and original art.